Uneven Seams Tips

Joy Beeson

>Valerie wrote:> I am trying to sew things together and it keeps ending up uneven. I  am pinning the material and I am not pulling and just letting the   machine do the work but nothing is working.

You may be putting pins in at right angles to the seam line -- this advice dates back to the first "walking foot": a foot with a hinge in it, so that it not only doesn't jam up at the slightest irregularity, it can stitch right over a pin! Salesmen were so impressed with this new capability that a lot of people, including teachers and how-to authors, got the idea that right angles was the right way to pin when sewing by machine.

In addition to making irregular stitches -- and a risk of hitting the pin and breaking the needle, with injury to the work and maybe the worker --right-angle pins encourage fabric to slip.

You should put the pins exactly in the seam line, with the points toward the approaching needle so that it is easy to pull them out as you approach them. In difficult cases, I'll hold the pin with a pair of eyebrow tweezers and let the machine pull the fabric off the pin.----

Also, you *should* pull on the fabric. We tell beginners not to because they tend to "help" the machine, which causes irregular stitches, and may bend the needle, which causes dented needle plates, torn work, flying shards, etc. The secret is to pull exactly as much from the back as from the front, so that there is no net force at the needle -- as if you had the work in an embroidery hoop. Some fine seamsters sort of make their hands into an embroidery hoop, spreading fingers to hold the fabric stretched against the bed of the machine -- I gather that with a little practice, you can move one hand while shifting the other, thus sewing continuously.

Having been trained in the rough-and-ready school, I grasp the seam behind the needle with my left hand and in front with my right, stitch to the next pin point, stop with the needle down in the fabric, shift my grip, and repeat. I don't hand-stitch threads through to make handles for the first and last parts as some do, but I do sometimes use a corsage pin (I thinkClotilde calls them "pearl-head pins"), or the point of a seam ripper, to hold the fabric for the last few stitches. When I sew a series of seams, Idon't cut the thread, and use the previous seam as a handle for the first part of the current seam. I turn the hand-wheel until the thread is attached to the new seam, pull on the previous seam until a few inches of the new seam are done, and *then* cut the thread. (Unless the seams are very short, and I want the pieces attached together in a chain to keep them in order.) 

It takes a bit of experience to tell exactly how hard to pull, and it varies with different fabrics and different stitches. Easily-stretched fabrics being zig-zagged (or sewn with another stretchable stitch) should not be pulled at all, and some fabrics should be pushed together as they go under the needle. I have a large bodkin made by my grandfather that I use for this purpose. It's a narrow strip of aluminum, round-pointed at one end, with two holes in the other. The tip is slightly bent exactly where it presses against the sewing-machine bed, so I suspect that my grandmother used it the same way.----

Also, the feed dogs actively move the fabric, and the presser foot slides over it. This causes the fabric to tend to be compressed on the bottom and stretched on top, so it's usually better to put the shorter piece on top when easing.

Some commercial sewing machines have feed dogs in the presser foot, or a presser foot that is a feed dog.

I gather from a recent thread that the current "walking foot" has a second hinge, so that it can be pulled back with the fabric instead of sliding over it. Then it rises up between stitches and is pulled forward by a spring. This makes it easier to sew thick seams and creepy fabrics, but, unlike the first walking foot, it does not seem likely to displace its predecessor entirely and end up being called just plain "foot".